On Beauty: a History of a Western Idea, Ed. Umberto Eco, trans Alastair McEwen

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There is an attractive idea behind this book - or rather, behind the CD-rom from which the book derives. On Beauty illustrates Western beauty in art from ancient Greece to the present in a ravishing display of images. These are placed alongside about 200 fairly lengthy extracts, in small print, from the standard texts: Plato, Plotinus, Hegel, Nietzsche and more. The images are gorgeous while the impressive documents are, understandably, hard going. The third strand of the book consists of a sequence of essays, a running commentary on the history of the idea of beauty.

The book is timely; there has been a recent surge of interest in beauty, but as yet it has not made much headway in the discussion of art. Art history is still crippled by a sociological obsession. While works of art obviously do reveal a lot about the societies in which they were produced, such revelation is - in the end - trivial. It is ridiculous to say that what is humanly important about Vermeer lies in what we can learn about his times. Hand on heart, who really cares about 17th-century Delft? The discussion of beauty is much more promising as a way of trying to understand why works of art actually matter to us - how we can delight in them, rather than merely find them interesting.

The special interest of this book must depend on the quality of Umberto Eco's engagement with the images and texts. After all, there are lots of books of nice pictures and plenty of anthologies of specialist writings about art. Eco, we hope, will draw images and ideas together. The point will lie in the wit and insight with which the two are brought into a shared conversation. We expect a stylish, passionate and engaged discussion that will educate and fire the imagination.

But, right from the start, one begins to suspect that not all is well with this project. The introduction makes a stab at pinning down the topic. This is a book about beauty - can we get a bit clearer about that elusive notion? Eco has a go: beauty is a bit like goodness, but different. How? Goodness is something you desire but "beauty is a good that doesn't arouse desire". One wants to shout, "But obviously beauty does sometimes arouse our desire for possession: we want that lamp because it's beautiful."

What Eco presumably means is that we do not first desire the object for the status it conveys, the practical use it serves or the wealth it represents and, on that basis, find it beautiful. Beauty doesn't proceed from other desires, but if we find something beautiful we may well desire to possess it.

What's troubling here is the crudity of Eco's mistake. To write "beauty does not arouse desire" is stunningly false. One can only assume that Eco had the other point (familiar to anyone of his erudition) in mind and simply could not be bothered finding a neat way of putting it.

The commentary as a whole, which should have been the soul of the book, is disappointing. Only one half of it is actually written by Eco, but this might as well as have been written by someone else. At one point he's telling the story of aestheticism, the "religion" of beauty. It traces the shifts in thinking from dandyism ("I make my exterior a work of art") to Impressionism, which attempts to isolate the fleeting charm of a moment. The lineage he traces is not remotely original. This is a stock chapter in the history of art. Fine; so perhaps he'll tell it in his own special and exciting way?

He doesn't. Here's a standard passage: "In Flaubert, the predominant feature is the cult of the right word, which can only confer harmony, an absolute aesthetic necessity, to the page. Whether he is observing with ruthless meticulous accuracy the banality of everyday life and the vices of his day (as in Madame Bovary) or evoking an exotic sumptuous world, pregnant with sensuality and barbarism (as in Salammbo) or tending towards demonic visions and the glorification of Evil and Beauty (The Temptation of St Anthony), his ideal remains that of an impersonal, precise, exact language, capable of making any subject beautiful thanks to the sheer power of his style."

This is just a wordy rehash of the standard textbook view. Having fired this summary at us, Eco does nothing with it. He doesn't tell us anything about the novels, he doesn't develop the notion of the "right word", or even give us an example of it. Then it's straight onto the next item, treated in exactly the same way.

There isn't any attempt to reach out to the audience, to explain why something might be interesting or valuable. There is a "survey" feel to this sort of writing, with no hint that one might want to share Flaubert's obsessions or that they have any resonance beyond his own time.

It's a case of, "now you've heard of one more strange idea someone once had." Why is it good to know this? Eco doesn't suggest an answer. This is "the Philistinism of culture": the willingness to be impressed by an idea that has no depth for you. You must know about it because a famous person once said it. Any postdoctoral student can write at that level, and many do. Eco, we know from the jacket, is dazzlingly intelligent, a writer whose words "dance on the page". On other pages, in other books.

In any case, half of the commentary is written by one Girolamo de Michele. This ghost-writer is acknowledged only in tiny print - among the technical data, after the ISBN and the postal address of Random House South Africa. And that is the level of recognition he deserves, even though he has been responsible for the discussion of many of the key periods: antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Addressing an exceptionally lovely portrait of a young woman by Ghirlandaio, the ghost says: "Reality imitates nature without being a mere mirror to it and, in the detail (ex ungue leonem, as Vasari put it, 'you may tell the lion by his claws'), it reproduces the Beauty of the whole. This ennoblement of the simulacrum would not have been possible without some decisive progress in pictorial and architectonic techniques." No elaboration, no clarification. The pompous prose - I select one of many such passages - is painfully exposed beside the portrait's tender clarity.

On Beauty belongs to the genre of the illustrated textbook; the writing does little to entice the reader. It certainly is "a remarkable new work from one of the world's most renowned writers and thinkers" - remarkable, that is, for the writing's lack of passion, wit, sensitivity and intellectual grace. Ironically, these are the very qualities so movingly evident in the illustrations.

John Armstrong's 'The Secret Power of Beauty' is published by Allen Lane

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